Requesting Canadian Responses to the Ontario Budget 2012: Surveys from Liberals and NDP

Responses to the 2012 Ontario Budget:

Poverty Action For Change Coalition (P.A.C.C.)

On March 27, the 2012 Ontario Budget, Strong Action for Ontario was released.

In this video,

P.A.C.C. (Poverty Action For Change Coalition) “attended the Ontario Government’s invite only lockup and afterwards follows up by visiting Queens Park gauging reaction.”
P.A.C.C.’s Tom Pearson comments here:

The Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (ISARC)

This is an update to my previous blogs:

Canadian Social Assistance Review: Ontario Commissioners Want Your Feedback By March 16, 2012.

ISARC: Canadian Social Assistance Review in Ontario & Religious Leaders’ Forum – March 29, 2012

Faith Community Response to the Release of Ontario’s 2012 Budget
Queen’s Park
Thursday, 29 March 2012

We, faith leaders gathered at Queen’s Park, assert that it is fundamentally unjust to balance the provincial budget on the backs of our most vulnerable neighbours.

Two days after the tabling of the 2012 Provincial Budget, religious leaders from across Ontario met at Queen’s Park for the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition’s Religious Leaders Forum. The focus of the forum was Health and Poverty.

Dr. Rosanna Pellizzari, Peterborough’s Medical Officer of Health, insisted on the need to prevent and reduce poverty in order to achieve better health, and emphasized that poverty and inequality hurt all of us, not just the poor.

Budget 2012 proposes to freeze social assistance rates and postpone the full implementation of the Ontario Child Benefit. This will increase poverty and inequality in Ontario.

In his opening theological reflection, Rafael Vallejo, Presbyterian Lay Minister challenged religious leaders, legislators and all Ontarians to ask “Who pays for austerity? Who says there is no choice?”

Ontario does have choices about how to balance the budget.

Poverty does not just happen. There are things that we do in society that create poverty and inequality. And there are things we can do to reduce poverty and inequality.

Therefore, to respect the letter and the spirit of Ontario’s landmark poverty reduction act, passed with unanimous support from all parties in the legislature, we call for these changes to the 2012 Ontario Budget:

raise social assistance rates to at least cover the rise in the cost of living,

immediately implement the full Ontario Child Benefit;

do not make structural changes to social assistance programs before hearing the recommendations from the Social Assistance Review Commissioners.

We support the call of Doctors and Lawyers for Tax Fairness to increase taxes for high-income individuals and corporations. Because taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society and being neighbour to each other.

As ISARC has so often insisted in the past, we live in a rich society. We certainly have the resources to end poverty in Ontario. We simply require the will to do so. We will all be richer for it.

For more information contact:
Rev. Susan Eagle, ISARC Chair, Phone: 705-817-3402

Please note that ISARC is urging “everyone to participate in two on-line surveys being conducted by the Ontario Liberal Government and the New Democratic Party (NDP).”

“Now is the time for people to be part of the democratic process to determine the priorities that matter for a socially just and economically equitable society.

Please fill out the on-line surveys now and pass on this link to others in your network.“

The on-line surveys can be accessed via the Income Security Advocacy Centre’s Call to Action as follows:

The Income Security Advocacy Centre

In response to the 2012 Ontario Budget, The Income Security Advocacy Centre is urging us to contact both the Liberals and the NDP, and tell them:

The freeze to social assistance rates must be stopped – people on assistance need an increase that will let them keep up with the rising cost of living;